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The ladies were talking about one of the doctors. He was a bit older than I was, but the girls at the table were smitten with him. They were age appropriate for him, and it was kind of adorable to hear them gush about him and get ever so slightly competitive with each other. Then one of them mentioned the time, and they got up to leave while I was stuffing the rest of my things in the locker.
My locker had a picture taped to the inside of the door, and as I shut it, I stopped for a moment to smile while I looked at it. It was a picture of Wendy, myself, and my sister, Malia, with her tiny baby girl, Alice.
Closing the locker, I walked out onto the floor and got to work.
Originally, I started in telemedicine. It had been a difficult job due to my having to do a lot of it from home, but it had allowed me to watch Wendy’s little ones for her as she rose up the ranks of her job and met her husband Finn. I kept at it, though, while I continued to study at the local community college, and eventually, I snagged the job at Appalachian Medical. Since working there, I had gone from overnight to swing shift to mornings, and I much preferred the morning shift. At least doing that meant I had a regular life outside of work, even if it meant going to bed at ten in the evening now.
It was easier now that Malia had moved out and was living with her fiancé, Gerry. They came over pretty often, but it wasn’t the same as having her living there with me in both the good and bad ways. For one, I didn’t have to worry I would be interrupting some video she was making that constituted her main income. I also didn’t have to deal with the fact that the poor girl had absolutely no idea how to properly load a dishwasher.
But on the other hand, I missed having someone around. The house was too quiet all the time and it made me feel a sadness that settled on me and made me put on loud television to drown out my thoughts.
When my sister did come over, though, she was never alone. Little Alice was a joy. She was such a ball of happiness and cuddles that I just wanted to keep her in my arms the entire time they were over and was a little jealous when she would cry to be fed and Malia would take her to breastfeed. There was something so happy and calm and loving about holding her that I had never felt before.
I’d held plenty of babies before. Many of them while I was at work at the hospital, in fact. But holding Malia’s baby and watching her and Gerry look at me with the same doe eyes while I rocked her and kissed her head, it was making me think about things I hadn’t in a long, long time.
Watching Malia find her partner and start going through the motions of beginning a family was wonderful. I loved seeing her recover from her horrible injury so fast, and to find someone as great as Gerry was to her was a bonus. While they hadn’t dated for a terribly long time before getting engaged and having a baby, there was no doubt that the two of them were meant for each other. But as much as I loved seeing Malia have her connection with Gerry and begin the steps of motherhood, it highlighted the hole in my own life.
The occasional dates I went on always fizzled out, usually before the first course was done. No one around Ashford was interesting or magnetic, at least to me anyway. In my excursions out of town to visit other friends who had moved away or to take specialized classes at other colleges for my degree, I found the men there uninteresting too.
No one had ever compared to Hawk.
I hated that. I hated that I still thought of him that way. I hated that I let him be the reason that I didn’t open up to other people like apparently everyone else could.
But the connection he and I had, as brief as it was, was at such a critical moment in my life and development that I felt like it arrested me there. I couldn’t move past it. Every guy got compared to him, and every experience was just something competing with the ones I had with him. I would still close my eyes at night and drift off to sleep, only to wake up burning, sweat dripping off my body and my core on fire with thoughts of him. The way he looked at me. The way he touched me. The way he felt inside me.
